Like most IT companies, Standuply crew has a cozy office too, where we go to work every day. As an office team, we managed to reach considerable heights in product building, but it was time to expand the team. So we decided to set the course in the direction of remote team building and began to look for employees in other places.

Now, many months later, we know a lot about remote work: how to work from home, how to manage a remote team and how to create a business with employees who rarely see each other in real life.

3️⃣ A new Voice/Video answering feature. We have fixed the issue with voice/video messages. So, we get rid of Youtube layer and now, we handle everything on our side. So, it's more secure and now, you don't need to have a Youtube account to use this feature. From today, any Slack user can record voice/video messages and send them within Slack as well as using it for answering to Standuply reports. As we wrote early in our post, we'll continue to work on this feature this month to extend supporting of other browsers and devices.

4️⃣ The custom endpoint for Program Manager templates and "Task response" questions. We added the option which allows you to integrate your own task tracker and run the processes like planning poker, backlog grooming or answering the questions by tasks selecting based on it. So, you can create by yourself some integrations for the task trackers which we aren't released yet or which aren't mentioned in our roadmap.

5️⃣ Adding supporting for the "Next-gen project" JIRA templates to create the requests. So, we extended our support for the new "next-gen project" JIRA templates and you can create Standuply requests like "burndown charts" and "tasks updates history" based on this JIRA template type.

P.S. Later, we plan to explain in details every announced feature by publishing a separate post. But you can always drop us the line and ask any question. Have a good week and stay tuned. 😉

We have 2 news and as it always happens the 1st one is bad and the 2nd is good.

So, I will start with the bad one. 💩

During the last few days, we've been experiencing issues with the voice/video answering. Users can't send the recorded answers and got the different error messages on the recording page.

As you know, we handle this functionality through the Youtube, but Youtube suddenly changed their API and we can't use it anymore for the voice and video recording.

But here is the good news come...😉

We planned to get rid of Youtube layer for the voice and video recording feature anyway. We put it in our roadmap at the beginning of this year. We were going to replace Youtube and handle everything ourselves.

That replacement had to allow us:

To store answers on our side, which improves the security concerns of many customers who weren't ready to use Youtube for their answers.

Add a supporting of all browsers and devices to use voice and video answering.

We planned to start this work in a few weeks. But because of Youtube changes, we have to push our efforts and we're jumping into this task right now.

So, we plan to do our work in 2 stages.

1️⃣ This week we'll just recover the working of current functionality for the Chrome browser. So, we'll replace youtube, all records will be stored on our end and the video/voice answering feature will start again to work from the Chrome browser.

2️⃣ By the end of this month, we'll extend supporting of this feature for all other browsers and devices.

Here’s the story from our friends and customers at Daily.co about how they’re using Standuply.

Like a lot of startup and product teams, we pull in tactics from agile development, scrum methodology and more. For us, working from anywhere was a key imprint from the start. (Our product’s geographical DNA includes Baja Sur, Colorado, Los Angeles, New York, Northern Europe, and San Francisco, where we’re now headquartered.)

The challenges of being a distributed team are well-documented. They hit you pretty fast. You don’t see each other. That’s compounded by working asynchronously, across time zones. It’s certainly tough syncing on information efficiently. You also don’t develop relationships in the same way.

What also figures into our DNA is our startup culture. One of the great things about building a new product is the sense of ownership and commitment. Our team builds Daily.co because we’re excited by our project. We want to stay informed, share details, and work together.

So, like a lot of distributed startups, we’re on Slack. It lets us ping each other fast, wherever we are. The challenge, of course, is to make sense of all the information flying around in Slack...